Chess Software for Linux

Once there was a time when chess software for the home was slow, weak and expensive. To find human opponents, you had to go to your local chess club. Today, the situations is different.

Linux offers a host of chess software
that provides master strength computer opponents and analysis, and
even an interface for playing against people all over the world via
the Internet.

The strongest chess programs readily available for Linux (to
my knowledge) are Crafty, Phalanx, and GNU Chess. Crafty is the
strongest, though Phalanx and GNU Chess play at master strength
(with fast hardware). Crafty is available via anonymous ftp from
ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/ while Phalanx is available from the
standard sunsite (sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/games/strategy/) and
GNU Chess can be downloaded from any GNU archive
(prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/). The chess interface of choice
(compatible with all three) is known as
xboard, though a pretty 3D
interface known as GLChess is available (the home page is
http://nether.tky.hut.fi/glchess). The most recent version of
xboard should also be available from any GNU archive, though an
older release probably came with your Linux distribution along with
GNU Chess.

Crafty

Crafty is the “long-time hobby” of Bob Hyatt, whose
previous works include Blitz and Cray Blitz. Crafty is a very
strong program and is constantly being enhanced. Though you could
just download the Linux binary and use it as is, opening books and
endgame databases are available from the ftp site, and add much to
the playability and strength of the program. You have a choice
between 1 MB (small), 30 MB (medium) and 74MB (large) opening books
(or, if you like, the monstrous wall.gz which expands to 222 MB).
For a basic installation, download the files crafty-14.13.linux,
small.zip, start.zip, crafty.doc, crafty.faq and read.me, or the
latest source if you want to compile it yourself. Give Crafty its
own directory (to store the book, game, position and log files),
move the Crafty files there and unzip them. Execute Crafty (if you
get a permission denied error, try using
chmod on
crafty-14.13.linux).

To create the opening book (book.bin) from the file small.txt
to a depth of 60 ply (30 moves), type:

book create small.txt 60

The file books.bin should also be created in order to tell
Crafty which openings it should (and shouldn't) play. The file
start.pgn contains the necessary data. Just type:

books create start.pgn 60

After this brief “installation”, you should have a small, master
strength chess program on your Linux box.

Performance can be maximized by allocating more memory to the
hash and pawn hash tables. I have a 64 MB machine, so I set the
options hash=24M and
hashp=10M. Crafty configurations can be
specified on startup; this means that you can include Crafty's
startup commands in the resource file of your window manager for
easier Crafty startup in X Windows.

Crafty can be run through xboard, with the Crafty-exclusive
benefit of a splendid analysis mode (compatible with more recent
versions of xboard) that allows you to move the pieces for both
sides while Crafty rattles off analysis several moves deep (you can
use analysis mode without xboard, but it's not as much fun). In
order to start up Crafty through xboard, type:

xboard -fcp 'crafty xboard'

or you can specify more options such as:

xboard -fcp 'crafty xboard hash=12M hashp=5M'

Phalanx

Even though Phalanx, by Dusan Dobes, is the youngest of the
three chess programs (it began in '97) it has managed to become
quite imposing; in fact, it is not much weaker than some modern
commercial chess software. Phalanx is also fun to play and good for
variety, since Crafty, GNU Chess, and Phalanx all have different
personalities. Phalanx should compile easily without any errors,
and is then immediately functional. It has a small, default opening
book, but creating your own from a PGN (pretty good notation) file
is easy; instructions are contained in the README file. Phalanx can
be used through xboard by typing:

xboard -fcp phalanx

GNU Chess

GNU Chess is the classic chess program
which has been around for ages on a number of platforms. It is also
rather strong and quite fun to play. GNU Chess came with my
Slackware and Red Hat installations, and I imagine it comes on
other Linux distributions as well, so you may already have it on
your machine. It is very fun for blitz chess, especially since with
its default opening book it is prone to making original moves which
may or may not be very good (this doesn't matter since it wins
anyway). GNU Chess can be played in a console or under the X Window
System through an interface. When xboard is executed, by default it
loads up GNU Chess and prepares for blitz games of 5 minutes per
side. You can, as usual, specify startup options; the xboard man
page contains the details.

I used to play computer chess on playchess.com using a Fritz interface (Fritz 11), which was able to load UCI engines like Rybka. I'm trying to find a way to play on playchess.com using ubuntu as a platform, but wasn't able to find a satifactory solution, with Wine the Fritz application just won't start. Probably the Linux community might find a solution for this in the near future.

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